It was not a remarkable hike. Short and quick. It was kind of cool out there. I was wearing a T-shirt. I was warm from hiking but my arms were cold and getting stiff so that it was hard to mess with the camera. It's time to find a sweatshirt to keep in my backpack.
The pictures I put on the web album are not all the same as the pictures I put in the trip. They serve different purposes, so I put different pictures on each, so you have to look at both. Sorry.
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| 2008_11_06 |
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| From 2008_11_04 |
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| From 2008_11_04 |
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| From 2008_11_04 |
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| From 2008_11_04 |
Here's what most of the pictures turned out like. Yuck.
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| From 2008_11_04 |
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| From 2008_11_02 |
Anybody know what kind of cholla this is?
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| From 2008_11_02 |
There are a lot of pretty rocks out there. I only took pictures of this shiny one, though.
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| From 2008_11_02 |
Know what's worse than having catclaw acacia grab your forearm? Having it grab your lip after it lets go of your arm and bounces up.
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| From 2008_11_02 |
This is Roblas Butte. I'd like to climb it (because it's there, and the view has got to be great up there), but it may not be possible without violating some of my hiking rules, and I'm not going to do that.
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| From 2008_11_02 |
There were high, thin clouds and a few puffy little clouds. A polarizing filter and Photomatix made them look pretty good in the pictures.
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| From 2008_11_02 |
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| From 2008_11_02 |
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| 2008_11_02 |
While I was resting in the shade of a saguaro near the cave, Lauren texted me. She asked if the cave was as cool as I expected it to be. I told her it wasn't cool, but I didn't get into the long explanation of why it wasn't. Actually, I never expected it to be cool. I don't like the trail to the cave, and I didn't like the cave. I didn't expect to. But it was there, and I could go, so I had to go.
On the trail, you are never out of the sight of civilization. That makes for some interesting pictures sometimes, but generally I don't like it. I like to get away from the rat race when I go hiking. And it isn't just the sight of civilization that is bothersome. I find the sound even more bothersome. For the entire 3 or 4 hours that I was on the trail, I was accompanied by two sounds. First there is the constant drone of traffic, punctuated by the occasional Harley with loud pipes. Second, there are the barking dogs. Bark, bark, bark, all day long. Why do so many people get dogs and then leave them in the yard all day to annoy the neighbors with their barking? These sounds follow you all the way to the cave. There is no escaping them.
I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the hike. I did. The sights are beautiful (if you look in the right direction ;-) ). Will I do it again? Probably not. I've already been there, and I have pictures. I'm going to go to Bulldog Canyon tomorrow and listen to the silence.
Anyway, about the hike... It's long. For about 3/4 of the way, it's a gentle up hill slope. Most people like gentle slopes, but they make my hip hurt. Strolling around flat places (like a shopping mall) is painful and leaves me limping. It felt good to get to the steeper part of the trail.
Have you ever hiked a long ways and then got to a steep part and thought, "Oh great, I'm already tired and now I have to climb"? I didn't. When I started up the steep part, my legs felt fresh and strong. That's why I went today instead of putting it off for cooler weather. I knew it would be easy today, but who knows what the future holds?
The steep part wasn't extremely steep. It's still a hike and not a climb (use of hands is not necessary). I must still be short a few red blood cells. I stopped a lot to catch my breath up the steep part. There was a light breeze out of the southwest, which felt really nice. When I got to the cave, though, I found out that the breeze didn't blow there. It was stifling. Also, the cave smelled sort of like urine. Maybe it was all the bird droppings. The cave was not a pleasant place to hang out today. I took a few pictures and went back down the trail to sit in the shade of a saguaro, where there was a breeze.
It's a shallow cave. A mine has been dug into the mountain at the back of the cave. The mine is only 10 or 20 meters deep. It looks like it might have been partially filled in, but I didn't want to stay in there long enough to figure it out.
Have you ever gotten to the end of a long hike and thought you couldn't have gone much further because your legs were so wobbly? I didn't. My legs were tired but had a few miles left in them. My hip was making me limp, though. I think it's tendinitis. What if it isn't and it gets worse and I go to the doctor and he says, "You need an artificial hip, and they aren't built to withstand hiking". Well, then I'm glad I hiked to Broadway cave today.
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| 2008_11_01 |
Ever since my last attempt at getting to the Broadway cave, I've been thinking that I need new hiking shoes. Mine weren't worn out. They were just too flimsy for trails like the one to Broadway cave. I had bruises on the bottoms of my feet after that hike. When I hiked on the trail at the end of Meridian a day or two ago, it seemed like I could feel every rock and bump through my shoes, as if I was wearing thick socks instead of hiking shoes. I knew I had to get something with stiffer soles.
So yesterday I went to Big 5, my favorite store in Arizona. I looked through all the hiking shoes, with my only criterion for selection being the stiffness of the sole. I found some that seemed like they would work. The employee helping me even brought a golf ball over for me to stand on to test them out. I decided to get them even though they weren't on sale. This would be the first time I had bought shoes there that weren't on sale. This would be the first time in at least 6 years that I had bought any shoes that weren't on sale, but I needed them. I was using un-birthday money, so it was OK. I went up to the register and they rang up with the sticker price of about $80. Gulp. Then another employee standing there said something like, "Oh, let me fix that." He pushed some buttons and said, "Oh, look, they're on sale!" Now they were only $50. Wow, what a deal; my own personal sale! I like Big 5 even more, now.
OK, now I have these nifty new hiking shoes (Hi-Tec Odyssey, BTW). I have to try them out, and what better place than the trail that convinced me I need them? I didn't get to the Broadway trailhead until about 5, which meant I had less than an hour of daylight. It was enough for a decent trial, though. I really like the shoes.
When I got back to the house, I decided to try out the i-gotU trip documenting software. I discovered that it also allows you to shift the time of your pictures if you don't have your camera time set exactly right. My camera time was still very close to exact, though. So I created a "trip" using their software and uploaded it to their website. This is another case of me taking pictures just to be taking pictures, and not having done any post-processing, and putting all of the pictures, good or bad, in the trip. You can click a play button and a car moves along the trip track, displaying pictures taken along the way. I wish it was a hiker instead of a car, but you get what you pay for.
It was a very nice evening for a hike. Upper 80's (which feels cool in the desert because the humidity is so low) and not even the slightest hint of a breeze, which is why I started this blog entry talking about the brown cloud. See how these seemingly random things eventually come together? I took too many pictures of the brown cloud, but like I said, this trip shows everything, no editing. Click below to check it out.
As you can see, I have it on the strap to my Rebel right now. I think I'll move it as soon as I think of a better place to carry it. It's a little inconvenient right there. It's small enough that I could put it just about anywhere. When I look at it, I think about the first GPS receiver I ever saw back in '78. That one was about 3 feet long, 2 feet wide, 1.5 feet high, weighed over 150 pounds, and the cooling fans screamed like banshees.
I went for a quick hike out at the end of Meridian road today to try out the logger. I was taking pictures just to take pictures. I didn't do any editing, and I put all of them on the web album, so don't be shocked. The purpose is to show how nifty the logger is. I could have refined the position of some of the pictures. Normal GPS error shows some of them having been taken a few feet off the trail when I know I was on the trail. Still, the accuracy will be much better than my guesswork in the low resolution areas.
The logger comes with software that can use the GPS track to geotag pictures. This time I used Microsoft Pro Photo Tools because it will allow you to shift you pictures with respect to the track if you don't have your camera time set correctly. I must have had the camera clock dead on, though; didn't have to adjust the time at all.
The logger software will also generate some kind of travel log with pictures to put on the web. I'll have to experiment with that. Sounds like it might be nifty. I noticed today, though, that you can view Picasa web album pictures on a map and "play" the pictures in sequence, so that you can see the pictures and where they were taken on a reasonably sized map. You can try it out with this album.
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| Meridian_2008_10_27 |
I was on the trail a little before 2. That's a bad time of day for landscape photography. Everything looks so bland without any shadows.
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| From Broadway_2008_10_25 |
There's still a lot of smoke in the air. You can see it in several of the pictures.
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| From Broadway_2008_10_25 |
It was not hot (maybe mid 80's) and there was a light breeze blowing, but I got pretty warm being out in the sun. I drank all of my water, even the emergency backup water. Fortunately, there are a lot of saguaros out there. They provide much needed shade during rest stops.
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| From Broadway_2008_10_25 |
I'm sure I'll get to the cave next time. I'm not going out there again until the temperature drops about 20 degrees, though. Also, it looks like the trail continues up Monument Canyon. I'll have to go see what's up there some time.
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| Broadway_2008_10_25 |
Our neighbors put fake spider webs all over their front yard. I thought these real ones would make good halloween decorations but my Sweetums doesn't see it that way.
You can usually tell when you've bumped into a black widow web. They're very strong. Fortunately, the black widow runs away when you do that. Well, all spiders do. People don't buzz and vibrate like bugs, so the spiders know it's nothing they want to mess with.
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| Meridian_sunset_2008_10_24 |
I drove into Bulldog Canyon today and stopped to take a picture of a mountain with the Rebel. Then I looked at the picture and it didn't look like the mountain. The mountain was much more garishly colored (like somebody had turned up the saturation).
I decided to take pictures in RAW mode today, so that I would have complete freedom to adjust color, contrast, sharpness, and lots of other stuff. I've been playing with this stuff for a couple of hours and I haven't tried all the knobs and buttons yet.
Then I thought about how I might get a picture adjusted the way I like it, but it might only look that way on my monitor. And then I thought that maybe I should calibrate my monitor. And then I thought that this is starting to sound obsessive.
I took a bunch of pictures of a dead tree. Here are a few of them. It's late now, and I'm going to bed. I'll calibrate the monitor, oh, when I get around to it.
It's a little strange how I found this trail. As I was driving out to Peralta road yesterday, I looked over at the Superstition Mountains and noticed a large cave. I'm sure I've seen it before, but yesterday it caught my attention. About that time a guy on a motorcycle went past me. I wondered if he had ever noticed the cave, or if he had even noticed the mountains. He never even glanced over there. It seems sad to drive by something so pretty without even noticing it. Anyway, this morning I was looking at random places in Google Earth. I had the Panoramio layer enabled so I could see people's pictures of various places. Most of those pictures are along highways. I have put a few pictures on Panoramio but I try to stay away from roads. I noticed that somebody that goes by ikanode does that, too, so I was looking through all of his pictures. He has some of Broadway cave, and the trailhead near there. Wow, there's the cave I noticed yesterday, and the coordinates of the trailhead parking lot. I knew where I was going that afternoon.
In this picture you can see the Flatiron on the left. Broadway cave is on the right. If you zoom in and look very closely you probably won't see a young man standing at the entrance of the cave because after being re-sized during the upload to the web album, he's only 2 pixels wide and 3 high. He isn't wearing a shirt, and neither is his fellow hiker. I didn't know they were there when I took the picture. I didn't know they were in any pictures until I got home. Even in the full resolution pictures, you can't tell it's people, but they are in several pictures and they moved around.
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| From 2008_10_19 |
The first part of the trail is long and has a gentle slope. The cave doesn't look very far away in the pictures, but that's misleading. The trail is difficult to walk on, too. When people walk on that trail, they loosen the dirt. Then when it rains, the dirt washes away and leaves the rocks. The rocks are loose and make for difficult footing. I bet I used 20% more energy by staying on that trail than I would have a couple of feet to the right or left of it. If everybody did that, though, soon the whole mountain side would wash away.
Since it's such a gentle slope, you don't really feel like you're climbing. I turned around and was looking down on Dinosaur mountain, though.
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| From 2008_10_19 |
This picture is taken from where I turned back. It seems close, but it's still quite a climb to the entrance. It would have taken at least another half hour to get to the entrance, and I would run the chance of running out of water before I got back to the truck. I probably would not have gotten dehydrated, but when you hike alone you don't take chances. The thing I was most worried about was walking back on that trail in the dark. I'd be lucky not to twist an ankle.
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| From 2008_10_19 |
The sky was full of high, thin clouds. They're the kind of clouds that spoil landscape photography (in my opinion). They look OK in the HDRI's, though.
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| From 2008_10_19 |
Those clouds can also make for very good sunsets. I need to practice getting sunsets with this new camera.
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| From 2008_10_19 |
Click below to see all of the pictures.
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| 2008_10_19 |
Oh, I almost forgot. When I was about halfway to the cave, two young men passed me on their way back to the trailhead. They were not wearing shirts. They were not carrying shirts. I don't think they had shirts with them. I didn't see any water, either. One of them was on his cell phone and was saying, "I'm dying on this mountain". They didn't look distressed, though. They were smiling. There was only one other vehicle in the trailhead lot, and they were the only people I saw coming back from the cave.
The climbing was easier this week, too. I haven't replaced all those red blood cells yet, but at least I could climb for a couple of minutes before I was gasping for air. Another thing that made it easier is that the humidity is finally dropping. When I stopped to take a couple of pictures, my face was usually dry by the time I started moving again.
Here's a picture of where I went. If you see where some of the pictures are geotagged, you can tell that I didn't get to the very top. In the picture the summit looks like it's surrounded by vertical rock. It looks like that from up there, too.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_18 |
The Superstition Mountains look nice from this angle.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_18 |
It took about 55 minutes to get to the top. I spent some of that time deciding which way to go, or changing my mind and retracing my steps. There are spots up there that look like trails, but I think they are rabbit trails. You can follow them until they go under a bush. As I approached the top, the wind died completely. I was back out in the sun, too. Closer to the top, I could hear the wind blowing up there. That motivated me to hurry that last 20 feet or so. The breeze was great.
The closer I got to the top, the more determined I was to get there. The curiosity about what the view on the other side was like was driving me nuts. Here are a few pictures of the view from the "top".
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| From Peralta_2008_10_18 |
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| From Peralta_2008_10_18 |
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| From Peralta_2008_10_18 |
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| From Peralta_2008_10_18 |
I decided to get a picture of myself up there. I put the camera on the small tripod I carry in my back pack and pushed the shutter and came to a screeching halt when I realized it had already taken the picture. Oops, forgot to set the timer. Pushed the shutter again and didn't even get in front of the camera before it took the picture. Two seconds isn't long enough. I fiddled around with it for a little while trying to change it to 10 seconds before I decided I would just have to move fast. Pushed the shutter and "dashed" to get in position. Didn't make it. It isn't a good picture, but it is sort of funny.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_18 |
Click below to see all of the pictures.
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| Peralta_2008_10_18 |
It was a pretty day and I didn't have anything else (much) that I had to do, and I was missing the quiet of the desert, so I went out to the middle of Bulldog Canyon. It was very nice. No mosquitoes or little green bugs; just the usual flies and gnats. (I thumped a few flies.) The sun sets pretty early these days, so I didn't wander far or take many pictures.
Lately when I hike, I carry both cameras with me. They each have features that I like, or capabilities that the other doesn't have. I don't want to be out on a trail and wish I had the camera I didn't have so I could get a picture that I couldn't without it. It's that cake thing again, but in this case I can have them both. I just look like a dork. Oh, well, there's usually nobody there to see me, and I don't give a hoot anyway. But I digress. Back to the cameras. There have been times (usually just before sunset) when I just didn't like the way the pictures I took of the mountains with my S3 IS looked. Here's an example:
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| From BC_2008_10_17 |
I wasn't thinking about comparing results, so these pictures aren't of exactly the same thing, but they're pretty close. Here's the picture taken by the Rebel:
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| From BC_2008_10_17 |
I think it looks a LOT better. The bright spots aren't washed out, and in general the color is much better. The main reason I got the Rebel was so I could get better landscape pictures. Looks like that will pan out.
I made a couple of HDRIs. This first one is an example of trying to make a picture look good that just shouldn't be taken in the first place. It just turns out looking bizarre.
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| From BC_2008_10_17 |
The moral of the picture is that HDRI cannot make everything look good or interesting.
Speaking of interesting, I was talking about small particulate matter in the valley atmosphere a little while ago, which is not interesting but I used to take pictures of it. It's called the "brown cloud". I haven't seen it much this summer. I did see it today, though, as it blew north over Fountain Hills. Here's the best plain vanilla picture I could get of it with my best (depending on what you want to do) camera.
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| From BC_2008_10_17 |
Here is an HDRI of the same view. It isn't black on the bottom and white on the top. It's still a bad picture, but it shows what I wanted to show and you can see other stuff (like, uh, power lines...), too.
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| From BC_2008_10_17 |
OK, maybe that wasn't very interesting, but the tarantula was. It was not moving (I think it might have been hoping I hadn't seen it). I was wondering what a tarantula feels like, so I was moving my finger very slowly towards it. I was thinking that maybe I should be making a video and I wish I had, because it hissed at me. At least I think it did. A gnat was buzzing in my left ear at the time so it was hard to hear. Anyway, it started walking away and I did not touch it. I don't think it's a good idea to touch things that hiss at you. Cats taught me that at a tender age. And that reminds me of an article I read the other day that said that until they are in their late teens, people do not learn from negative experiences. Based on personal experience, I find that hard to believe, though it would explain why there are so many videos on YouTube of teenagers grinding down hand rails and then smashing their faces on concrete, even though their previous 20 attempts resulted in numerous small abrasions, contusions, and torn clothes. But, once again, I digress. It's the beer (not the cake). Click below to see all of the pictures, unless you can't stand tarantulas, in which case you'll just have to wonder what you are missing.
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| BC_2008_10_17 |
There was no wind today, and the temperature was perfect. It was gorgeous out there. Except for one tiny little thing. Well, actually a bunch of tiny little things. The only place I've seen more mosquitoes in Arizona is in the trees on the banks of the Salt River. There were other little bugs, too, but I didn't become aware of them until I got home. I still feel them crawling all over me. I may have to take a shower before I eat.
Anyway, enough whining. I've taken pictures of the moonrise out there before but the disk of the moon was always washed out, or you could see the moon but nothing else. I thought Photomatix would be able to solve that problem for me. I'm afraid it wasn't up to the task, though. Maybe I need to play around with it some more. I'll have to do that later. I'm going to take a shower right now. Here are a few pictures.
It's been windy for several days now. It looked really hazy on the way out there from all of the dust in the air. I parked in a small cleared spot next to the road, near a small mountain that looked like it needed climbing. I noticed this morning while doing some yard work that I still really miss all those red blood cells. Seems like I heard somewhere that it takes about 6 weeks to replace them. Maybe the stress of hiking will convince my body to replace them sooner than that. I hope so.
I started up the mountain just to see what I would see along the way. I couldn't tell if I would find a route to the top, and didn't really care if I made it to the top or not. I was going in this direction.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_11 |
Here's the view of the Superstition Mountains in the other direction.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_11 |
It seems that you can always find something interesting in the desert. Maybe I feel that way because I'm easily amused. Maybe most people find my discoveries to be quite droll. Oh well, that doesn't matter as long as I'm happy. But I digress. Let's see, something interesting. Oh yeah, part way up I saw what looked like a seldom traveled trail. As I was trying to see where it came from and where it went, I heard a metallic rattling sound (remember the wind?). Looking towards the sound, I saw what there seem to be a lot of in the desert; a memorial to a lost loved one. The wreath and pieces of artificial flowers had been scattered by the weather.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_11 |
There was a small American flag folded up on the ground near the cross. Normally I don't touch these memorials, but seeing the flag made me thing of our troops in the middle east. I placed the flag in a plastic box full of rocks at the base of the memorial.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_11 |
You can see that his (or her) buddies drank some beer, and left some beer there, too. It was tempting, but it was Budweiser so I was able to resist.
The view from where I stopped climbing was nice.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_11 |
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| From Peralta_2008_10_11 |
The wind was really annoying, so I headed down. I drove the rest of the way to the Peralta trailhead. I stopped at the Lost Goldmine trailhead. This sign made me wonder about something. If they do a background check on people buying guns, why don't they also do a brain check? Maybe it's for the same reason that tobacco isn't outlawed; it would put too many people out of business and be a disaster for the economy.
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| From Peralta_2008_10_11 |
Click below to go to the web album with all of the pictures (no HDRI today).
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| Peralta_2008_10_11 |
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